tolerate it
“Now I'm begging for footnotes in the story of your life”
“Now I'm begging for footnotes in the story of your life”
“I wait by the door like I'm just a kid”
“I greet you with a battle hero's welcome”
trying to hold attention / effort that stops
“stopped trying to make him laugh, stopped trying to drill the safe”
“I'm still trying everything to get you laughing at me” — mirrorball
Community reading by @Wraiths_and_Wreckage on the mirrorball YouTube episode and Patreon commenter SamIam reads mirrorball alongside Tolerate It as two positions in the same arc: mirrorball is the speaker still working to hold someone's attention, still performing for an audience that has already started to leave; Tolerate It is the epilogue, the moment the trying stops. The bridge's "still trying everything to get you laughing at me" pairs with Tolerate It's "stopped trying to make him laugh" as before and after on the same effort.
the whole song as an inner narrative while watching him
“I sit and watch you”
“But I swear You were there” — evermore
A Patreon reader hears evermore work the way tolerate it does: the song read as an interior monologue running underneath an ordinary domestic scene, the speaker narrating her own depression while physically sitting and watching the other person. The "you were there" that breaks the spell lands like the return to the room - the cabin floor creaking underfoot - after a stretch spent inside her own head.
his version of tolerating it
“You finally left the table / You're starving 'til you're not” — Opalite
Community readers cast the second verse's starving figure who "finally left the table" as living his own version of tolerate it - the partner who waits, under-fed by the relationship, until he recognises it is time to go.